


the end of all things (and the start of some)

by dirtybinary



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Drowning, Flashbacks, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-01
Updated: 2015-10-01
Packaged: 2018-04-24 07:16:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4910194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtybinary/pseuds/dirtybinary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p></p><blockquote>
  <p>“The span of a breath,” he explains, or tries to explain, still mostly delirious in his hospital bed. “And then he was there. It was all very quick. How long <i>is</i> the span of a breath?”</p>
  <p>“On average?” asks Natasha, who, as always, can be counted upon to dispense trivia like free candy. “Thirty or forty seconds. But the Guinness World Record for static apnea is upward of twenty-two minutes.”</p>
  <p><i>Or seventy years</i>, he thinks, just before he falls back asleep.</p>
</blockquote><br/>Bucky saves Steve from drowning in the Potomac. Steve relives the rescue over and over again, in dreams and flashbacks and fantasy.
            </blockquote>





	the end of all things (and the start of some)

The river is a house they have to haunt again, sooner or later.

Steve remembers little of his excursion to the bottom of the Potomac, but imagination is, as always, more potent than reality. In his morphine-riddled dreams that first night in the hospital, he inhales water that turns to acid in his lungs, wheezing and asthmatic again; his feeble arms thrash gracelessly, hopelessly, while his artist eyes search for hue and light and saturation against the encroaching dark, a hint of salvation.

He calls a name, but if the fishes hear, they do not answer.

(“It wasn’t like that,” Bucky assures him much later. “You were very calm. You were fearless.”

This iteration of Bucky, for all that he is beginning to rediscover a century’s worth of memory, is still out of practice at reading Steve. Steve tells him so.)

Steve wakes up to the smoky croon of Marvin Gaye and the slinking knowledge, insidious as eels, that he has left a crucial part of himself in the river: not only his shield, but—if that can be imagined—something even more intimate, and altogether harder to envision. As soon as he is allowed out of bed, he gets in the shower and turns on the cold-water tap at full blast, watching the little droplets hurtle towards him like a storm of meteors. Contact stimulates haptic feedback stimulates memory. He sees, once more, the last death throes of Project Insight decorating the firmament from skyline to horizon; the receding light as he sinks, for once in perfect obedience to gravity; and then, at last, the sight he has waited for with bursting lungs: a hand he knows, outstretched.

(“The span of a breath,” he explains, or tries to explain, still mostly delirious in his hospital bed. “And then he was there. It was all very quick.”

Inhale, hold, exhale, hold, keeping his voice steady over the pain. An old trick he hasn’t forgotten. When he can speak again, he asks, “How long _is_ the span of a breath?”

“On average?” asks Natasha, who, as always, can be counted upon to dispense trivia like free candy. “Thirty or forty seconds. But the Guinness World Record for static apnea is upward of twenty-two minutes.”

 _Or seventy years_ , he thinks, just before he falls back asleep.)

Bucky comes back to him dirty and unshaven and Steve sits outside the bathroom that first evening, listening to the familiar sounds of a housemate showering. To the lather of soap and the scour of skin against skin, and the burble of water down a drainpipe. Bucky comes out sopping wet, dripping onto the clean t-shirt and boxers Steve lent him, because seventy years is a long time (is the span of a breath) and he has forgotten how showers work. Steve stands in the bathroom doorway with a towel he is not conscious of having picked up, thinking, _This is what he must have looked like that day_. With his wild chestnut hair plastered against the contour of his cheek, and his thick lashes beaded with moisture, and the surface of his arm scintillating in the guileless gaze of the bathroom light, an eerie fluorescent enchantment. If they speak, they might break it.

Steve’s fingers twitch for his pen or stylus. Times like this, art feels so very simple, and poetry so very near. Take a man fresh from the shower and pose him under a cheap lightbulb, and people would raid museums to steal his portrait. It must be the right man, of course, and the right artist, both of them haunted by the same ghosts. But those are just technicalities, the parameters within which a miracle is defined.

(“Quit looking at me like that, Rogers,” Bucky says. “I’m gonna short-circuit.”

His servos hum, as if for emphasis. But he is not smiling, and it is a joke only in the most superficial use of the word.)

The next day Steve goes out and buys a Copic marker in the exact shade of Bucky’s eyes. But it is a month before he can bring himself to open it, and then he ends up using it only to colour in the riffs and eddies of sun and shadow pockmarking the stony riverbed he still sees in his dreams. The chiaroscuro of light and dark; the gleaming hand reaching for him with dreamlike slowness, his numb fingers clutched in Bucky’s unfeeling ones.

And it is a year before he stands chest-deep in the pool on the roof of Avengers Tower and says, softly, privately, in a voice meant only for enhanced hearing, “Come and get me.”

It is two A.M. They are alone—with each other, and the glimmer of the city lights, and the hum of distant rushing cars, and the ever-present gurgle of water that skulks at the back of all of Steve’s dreams like a comforting lullaby; so perhaps they are not alone after all. Bucky studies him from the shallow end. The glint of his eyes is the same as the play of moonlight on the edge of a blade, as brilliant, as sharp and penetrating. He knows where this is going. More than that, he knows where it is coming from; and as he crosses the distance between them with characteristic efficiency, first wading, then treading water, there is gentle understanding written in all the lines of his face. Not mocking, but sardonic.

“I still dream of drowning,” Steve tells him.

“I know.”

Steve opens his arms, and Bucky comes into them, whole, solid, corporeal. ( _He is a ghost_ , they told him once, but all the intelligence agencies of the world do not know what he has learnt by heart from childhood: the sweet, undemanding weight of Bucky on the other half of his mattress, his brown hairs clogging up the shower drain, his books and comics taking up space on Steve’s rickety desk.) “They’re not bad dreams,” Steve says. “Not anymore.”

Once more: “I know.”

The water is luxuriant with artificial warmth, and the light from an overhead lamp shimmers between them on the surface of the pool. Water, and fluorescence, and art. Steve lifts one dripping hand and skims the edge of his thumbnail across the angle of Bucky’s jaw, along the curve of the stubbled cheek and up to his ear. It elicits a smile, expected; and a shiver, unexpected. He has long memorised the geometry of Bucky’s face, but there is still so much to learn about the meteorology of his moods.

He says, “Mind if I go under for a bit?”

“You ain’t pretty enough to be a mermaid, Stevie,” says Bucky, but again, he is not smiling; and again, it is not a joke.

Steve takes a deep breath and slips down, letting the water close over his chin, his nose, the crown of his head, gentle as a benediction. His eyes are open even though there is no need for sight—he can feel Bucky’s flesh hand on the nape of his neck, Bucky’s metal arm round the curve of his waist, warmer than the water around it. Bucky’s face is a blur above him, haloed in brown; and from here, peering at him as if out of another world, all Steve can make out of his face is the upturned bow of his lips.

His eyes are stinging, and his lungs are burning, and it is the safest place in the world.

Bucky’s arm whirs, sending vibrations through his spine, and then Steve is rising headlong up and up and up to break the surface of the pool. He draws in a great surge of oxygen on instinct, and his head cartwheels with the shock of it, euphoric as a helium balloon. Bucky glowers at him, but only with his mouth; his eyes are slow on the uptake and still twinkling. “You were down there a long time.”

“Not really,” Steve says. “Just the span of a breath.”

“Yeah,” Bucky agrees, and Steve knows, just like that, that they are thinking the same thing. “What I said.”

(He demonstrates just how long in the most concrete and pragmatic way possible, using his own mouth and his own lungs, and does not even seem to mind that Steve’s breath reeks of chlorine.)

**Author's Note:**

> This was written in response to a stucky + showering together prompt on [Tumblr](http://dirtybinary.tumblr.com), but... decided to go its own way?


End file.
